Tag Archives: self worth

The Symbolic Journey of St Teresa’s Interior Castle

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The 15th century mystic, Teresa of Avila, loved the usage of archetypal symbolism and metaphor in her writings to describe her understanding about the nature of the divine, the state of heaven, the substance of the soul and the stages of the spiritual life. The Interior Castle was one of her finest teachings on the nature of the soul and prayer and is beautifully written in symbolic language. Of this interior castle, Teresa wrote:
 
I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many mansions.1
 
She described the crystalline image of the soul as consisting of seven domains or mansions which define developmental points of growth for the soul in the process of spiritual evolution. This evolution is the souls’ movement towards deeper union with God. The soul which has reached the first mansion is in the earliest developmental stages of the spiritual life.
 
It is important to note that developmental stages are a helpful metaphor for broadly describing something of our reaching particular milestones or goals in the psychological or spiritual life. However, the experience of deeper union with the Divine is not a linear process. Human beings often learn and grow through patterns of circularity rather than in a linear manner. People often repeat and revisit life-lessons and experiences several times over before fully integrating them into the psyche.
 
The metaphorical journey into God doesn’t presuppose that there is an absence of God within the human soul which we somehow correct by the efforts of the ego, which is incapable of undertaking such an endeavour. As Julian of Norwich reminds us, the soul was created out of the substance of God, bearing within itself the divine image. We are, as Thomas Merton said, shining more brightly than the Sun. We are inseparable from our Source, though we might experience ourselves as separate. As St Catherine of Sienna said:
 
The soul is in God and God in the soul.
 
Although the Interior Castle is Teresa’s narrative of the soul’s journey of growth and maturation in God – even with the divine journeying with the soul into the purifying experience of painful darkness – it is a love story between us and divinity. God pursues the soul and gifts it with divine love; with an experience of oneness and unity with God. It is not our effort but God’s graciousness -with a little willingness and perseverance from us- that effects the complete experience of union.
 
In the Teresian language of the Interior Castle, the First Mansion is considered to be the furthest dwelling place away from the seventh dwelling. According to Teresa, the soul experiences a sense of full unification with the divine in the seventh mansion. Each mansion between the first and the seventh describe something of our progressive growth into the love and mystery of the divine.
 
In this first mansion Teresa considers the soul as still dwelling very much in the superficial realm of life, overly concerned with the ephemeral though possessing some desire to find a way forward in the spiritual life. Teresa recognises that through grace the person who has entered the first mansion has the desire for the spiritual life but they are still neophytes and they are easily susceptible to self-doubt and fear. She refers to these influences as being like reptiles that bite at the resilience of the soul. For Teresa, the importance of the cultivation of the spiritual life helps us to build spiritual resilience in the first mansion in order to progress forward into deeper union with the indwelling divine presence. Patience, dedication and self-compassion are important qualities to cultivate in building our resolve to make this inner journey, knowing that this journey is our birth right to undertake. And we need to remember that we are creatures of circularity, insofar as we move around and between these metaphorical mansions (backwards and forwards too) reinforcing our learning, and developing familiarity with our mind and emotions and how they operate.
 
Each movement through the mansions would indicate an increasing level of spiritual consciousness in which the influences of the individual ego and the challenges of life-circumstances decrease in strength against our endeavours, resulting in a gradual increase in the souls’ resilience and experience of divine consciousness.
 
1 Teresa of Avila. Interior Castle. Ed. and Trans. E. Allison Peers. New York: Dover Publication, 2007.
2 Catherine, of Siena, Saint, 1347-1380. (1907). The dialogue of the seraphic virgin, Catherine of Siena : dictated by her, while in a state of ecstasy, to her secretaries, and completed in the year of our Lord 1370; together with an account of her death by an eye-witness. London :K. Paul, Trench, Trübner,

Your Worth Has Never Been Dependent Upon Your Productivity

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The world has told us from the day we were born that our value and worth are determined by our productivity; by what we do and achieve. At school we are taught that we must study hard; do well in our tests and exams; find a good job or do well in higher education. Our parents who were conditioned by the same lie will have inadvertently reinforced this message of self worth being dependent upon productivity. A smaller percentage of parents may have been so neglectful or actively harmful to their children – because they were the children of intergenerational neglect too – that the self esteem of their children feels beyond reach. For them the cultural message of worthiness being based upon productivity is etched into their psyche but they may lack the skills to pursue the untruth of “productivity”, and so feel even less worthy in the game of life. It’s no wonder therefore that for some people, feeling inadequate or having a sense of imposter syndrome is their core experience of being. For some, the pain of feeling inadequate may make them defensive or self sabotaging. For others life may feel like an experience of automatic pilot alongside quiet desperation. But for many, life is an endless process of just getting on with things – getting through each day and telling themselves that the weekend or the next Netflix show isn’t far away. This is the growing experience of western people especially now living in a world that is too expensive, too debt ridden to live “productively”, but still driven by the belief that self worth is based upon productivity.
 
One of the saddest things I have heard from so many people with advanced incurable illness is that they feel worthless because they are no longer “productive”. They have learned to determine their sense of self worth through what they do, rather than because of who they are. This is not surprising because our consumerist and individualistic culture places self worth upon our productivity, despite the obstacles that stand before us.
 
Today we are living through a time of scarcity where wages are stagnant and everything is expensive and increasingly becoming more expensive. Pay cheque to pay cheque is the experience of many. The dominant culture, nonetheless, continues to tell us that we should work harder and be just be more productive. It blames us when we can’t cope and tells us that we are inadequate for struggling.
 
The truth is that we are valuable just because we exist. We are valuable because we are beings of infinite dignity, purpose and worth. We are beings of the clear light of divinity. We are divine creations who are eternally loved and are made from the substance of love itself. We do not experience ourselves as such because of the conditioning of this broken world, however that is who we are. We are children of the Living Light. The question is, how can we make conscious contact with the essence of our being when we have been told for so long that who we are, depends upon what we achieve? Part of the path to freedom from this thought from of scarcity is realising that our conditioning is a lie. It really is a terrible lie.
 
There are powerful spiritual forces in this world guiding us into a greater level of evolutionary transcendence. But there are also archonic forces trying to destroy this next step into greater consciousness. Through this knowledge of our true identity, we can start the process of rejecting the pathogenic lie that we are inadequate. Do not forget each day to affirm that you are a sovereign being and that others are sovereign beings too. Remember each day to stop, breathe slowly and deeply, and affirm with authority that Love is your natural state of being leading you gently into the light of truth. See the light hiding behind the eyes of all whom you encounter, even if they don’t realise it themselves, and feel compassion for their suffering because of their ignorance of who they truly are.
We have to start somewhere with the movement out of fear and into love ❤️

The Importance of Meaning

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Originally written for the Lynn News, Thought for the Day
 
Viktor Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist who was a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust. He spent three years in the infamous concentration camp, Auschwitz. This experience led him to write a transformative book called Man’s Search for Meaning. The book describes how finding deep meaning in his life, despite the horrors surrounding him, gave him the resilience to survive. Frankl later went on to found a school of psychotherapy called logotherapy, which helped patients transform their psychological suffering through developing a deep sense of meaning. He believed that meaning enhances our spirit and our will, to both survive and thrive. Frankl once said:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
For Frankl his source of meaning whilst in Auschwitz related to the completion of a manuscript that he had started before his internment. Meaning does not need to be anything grand or radical. It is most often related to the capacity of the human heart to care about something that is important to us. It might be about what we do for a living, a close relationship, our creativity, or anything that warms and inspires our heart. Maya Angelou, the Black American poet, political activist and writer, tells us that she suffered a terrible trauma in her childhood which stopped her from speaking from the age of 8 until she was 11. As a Black woman in the pre-Civil Rights era of the U.S., she was well acquainted with the experience of racism and sexism. In one of her most famous and profound poems Still I Rise, she says:
 
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
 
The poem continues to describe the reasons why Maya will rise from oppression. There is humour in this poem that weaves through the verses:
 
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
 
What gives you meaning in your life? Does it make you smile? Do you want to befriend it and hold it close? Whatever it is, your meaning is about your unique and precious self, held safe and nurtured as a citizen of the Cosmos.
Jesus once reassuringly told us:
 
In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.
 
The Buddha once advised us:
 
We are what we think…with our thoughts, we make the world.
 
Our capacity for thought, reason, reflection, story-telling and creation, borne from both our heart and mind, are our tools for creating meaning. Let our hearts and our thoughts, anchored in a deep and loving respect for ourselves and others, lead us to make deep meaning in our lives.